Thank you all for being here today and the late comers as well. Thank you for coming in quietly.

I wanna start off today just to take a moment of silence

for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake and also for the victims of the Boston marathon bombing.

So let's just take a minute to pay our respect to them.

Thank you.

I never thought I would be addressing you, the esteemed members of the Oxford Union

without a guitar or an Erhu, without my crazy stage hair, costumes.

But I did perform in the O2 Arena in London last week. I'm not sure if any of you were able to make that.

But in many ways, that was similar to what I'm talking about today, that is, introducing Chinese pop music to you.

See, I'm actually an ambassador for Chinese pop, whether I like it or not, both music and movies.

And today, I'm here to give you the state of union address.

It's not the Oxford union. It's the union of East and West.

I wanna frankly, openly, and honestly talk about how we've done a good job or how we've done a bad job of bringing Chinese pop to the West.

And I also want to press upon all of you today the importance of that soft culture,

that soft power exchange and how each of us is involved in that exchange.

Soft power, a term I'm sure you're all familiar with at this point.

Coined by Rhodes Scholar and Oxford alumnus Joseph Nye is defined as the ability to attract and persuade.

ShashiTharoor called it, in a recent TED talk, the ability for a culture to tell a compelling story and influence others to fall in love with it.

I like that definition.

But I want to put it in collegiate term for all you students in the audience: The way I see it, East and West are kind of like freshman roommates.

You don't know a lot about each other but suddenly you're living together in the same room.

And each one is scared that the other's gonna steal his shower time, or wants a party when the other wants to study.

It has the potential to be absolute hell, doesn't it?

We all had horror stories of that roommate. We've all heard about those stories.

I know a lot of students here in Oxford have your own separate bedrooms.

But when I was a freshman at Williams College, I was not so fortunate.

You're kidding me. Woo-hoo! Alright, alright. Great.

Well, I had a roommate, and he was that roommate. Let's just call him Frank.

So, Frank was my roommate and Frank like nothing more than to smoke weed. And he did it everyday.

And Frank had a two-foot long bong under his bed that was constantly being fired up.

For those Chinese speakers in the audience Frank would "火力全開–‹" on that bong everyday.

So, I guess I was kind of the opposite of Bill Clinton who tried Marijuana but didn't inhale. I didn't try Marijuana but I did inhale.

Every single day, second hand.

And strangely enough every time I go into our bedroom I mysteriously end up late for class.

I don't know how that happened. It was like, "Dude, is it already 10 o'clock?"

So, how many of you have lived with the Frank? Or, could be a Frank Gat?

Having a roommate can be a recipe for disaster, but it also has the potential for being the greatest friendship you've ever had.

See, Frank, he didn't make it to second year. And I got two new roommates second year.

Stephan and Jason. And in this day, the three of us are the best friends.

So going back to my analogy of East and West as roommates.

Do we wanna be Frank, or do we wanna be Stephan and Jason?

And I think, in this day and age of 2013, we should all striving for the latter, shouldn't we?

I mean, I'm assuming that we all agree that this is the goal we should all be striving for.

Now, let'€™s look at where we are in reality, in recent headlines, in the media include

Foreign Policy magazine, China'€™s victim complex, Why are Chinese leaders so paranoid about the United States

or the AFP, Agence France Presse, Human rights in China worsening, US finds.

Bloomberg says, on the cover of this magazine, Yes, the Chinese army is spying on you.

And it’s such a great one that I just want to show you the cover of the magazine. Yes, be very afraid!

There’s actually an extremely high amount of negativity and fear and anxiety about China, Sinophobia,

that I think is not just misinformed but also misleading and ultimately dangerous. Very dangerous.

And what about how Westerners are viewed by Chinese?

Well, we have terms for Westerners. The most common of which are gwailo, in Cantonese which means “the old devil”,

laowai, meaning “the old outsider” in Mandarin, ang moh, which means “the red hairy one” in Taiwanese, and the list goes on and on.

So are these roommates heading for a best friend relationship? I think we need a little help.

And as China rises to be a global power, I think it is more important than ever for us to be discerning about what we believe because after all,

I think, that’s the purpose of higher education, and that’s why we are all here, to be able to think for ourselves and make our own decisions.

China’s not just those headlines. The burgeoning economy with unique politics.

It is not just the world’s factory or the next big superpower.

It’s so much more, a billion people with rich culture, amazing stories, and as a product of both of those cultures, I want to help foster an understanding between the two.

And help create that incredible relationship, because knowing both sides of the coin, I really think that there is a love story waiting to be told, ready to unfold.

And I’m only half joking when I said love story because I believe it is the stories that will save us and bring us closer together.

And my thesis statement for today’s talk is that the relationship between East and West needs to be and can be fixed via pop culture.

That's a big fat claim, and I’m going to try to back it up.

Now, the UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki Moon said,

“There are no languages required in the musical world. That is the power of music. That is the power of heart.”

Through this promotion of arts we can better understand the culture and civilization of other people.

And in this era of instability and intolerance, we need to promote better understanding through the power of music.

The UN Sec-Gen thinks that we need more music, and I think that he is right.

Music and arts have always played a key role in my life, in building relationships, replacing what once were ignorance, fear and hatred, with acceptance, friendship and even love.

So I have a strong case for promoting music between cultures because it happened to me early in my life.

I was born in Rochester, New York, I barely spoke a word of Chinese. I didn't know the difference between Taiwan or Thailand.

I was...It's true.

I was as American as apple pie, until one day on the 3rd grade playground, the inevitable finally happened: I got teased for being Chinese.

Now every kid gets teased or being made fun of in the playground, but this was fundamentally different and I knew right then and there.

So this kid let’s call him Brian McKilroy. He started making fun of me, saying “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!”

I can't believe you're laughing at that - that hurts! Ok, I'm just kidding.

I could still remember how I felt, I felt ashamed, I felt embarrassed. But I laughed along with him, with everyone.

And I didn't know what else to do. It was like having an out of body experience.

As if I could laugh at that Chinese kid on the playground with all the other Americans because I was one of them, right?

Wrong, on many levels.

And I was facing the first and definitely not the last time the harsh reality was that I was minority in Rochester, which in those days had an Asian population of 1%.

And I was confused. I wanted to punch Brian.

I wanted to hurt him for putting me in that situation but he was faster than me, and he was stronger than me,

and he would kick my butt and we both knew that, so I just took it in.

I didn't tell anyone or share with anyone these feelings, I just held them in and I let them fester.

And those feelings would surface in a strangely therapeutic way for me through music,

and it was no coincidence that around at that time I started getting good with the violin, and the guitar and the drums.

And I’d soon discovered that by playing music or singing that the other kids would for a brief moment

forget about my race or color and accept me and then be able to see me for who I truly am:

a human being who is emotional, spiritual, curious about the world, and has a need for love just like everyone else.

And by the sixth grade, guess who asked me if I would be the drummer of their band? Brian McKilroy. And I said yes.

And that’s when we together formed an elementary school rock band called… Nirvana.

I’m not kidding, I was in a rock band called Nirvana before Kurt Cobain's Nirvana was ever known

So when Nirvana came out, Brian and I were like, hey he’s stealing our name!

But really what attracted me to music at this young age was just this, and still is what I love about music,

is that it breaks down the walls between us and shows us so quickly the truth that we are much more alike than we are different.

And then in high school, I learned that music wasn’t just about connecting with others, like Brian and I were connected through music.

It was a powerful tool of influence and inspiration.

Sam Nguyen was my high school janitor. He was an immigrant from Vietnam who barely spoke a word of English.

Sam scrubbed the floors and cleaned the bathrooms of our school for twenty years.

He never talked to the kids, and the kids never talked to Sam.

But one day before the opening night of our school’s annual musical, he walked up to me holding a letter,

and I was taken aback and I was thinking, why is Sam the janitor approaching me?

And he gave me this letter that I’ve kept it to this day, it was scrawled in shaky hand written in all capitals and it read,

in my all years working as a janitor at Sutherland, you were the first Asian boy to play the lead role.

I’m going to bring my 6-year-old daughter to watch you perform tonight because I want her to see that Asians can be inspiring.

And that letter just floored me. I was 15 years old and I was absolutely stunned.

That was the first time I realized how music was so important.

With Brian, it helped two kids who were initially enemies to become friends, but with Sam, music went beyond the one-on-one.

It was an even higher level; it influenced others I didn’t even know, in ways I could never imagine.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to Sam the janitor to this day. He really is one of the people who helped me discover my life’s purpose,

and I had no idea that something I did could mean more than ever imagined to an immigrant from Vietnam who barely even spoke English.

Pop culture, music, and the other methods of storytelling, movies, TV dramas, they are so key, and they do connect us, like me and Brian, and do influence us, and inspire us.

Then let’s take another look at this state of union, the East and West union, with this soft power bias.

How is the soft power exchange between these two roommates?

Are there songs in English that have become hits in China? For sure.

How about movies? Well, there are so many that China has had to limit the number of Hollywood movies imported into the country so that local films could even have a chance at success.

What about the flip side of that, well, the Chinese songs that have hit in the west?

Well... [inaudible answer from an audience member], yeah, and movies, well there was Crouching Tiger [Hidden Dragon], that was 13 years ago.

Well, I think there’s a bit of an imbalance here.

And I think it's “soft power deficit”, let's call it that, when we look in this direction, that is to say the West influences the East more than vice versa.

Forgive me for using “East” and “West” kinda loosely, it’s a lot easier to say than “English-speaking… language” or “Asian-speaking… language/Chinese”,

I’m making generalisation and I hope you can go with me on this.

And it’s just intrinsically a problem, this imbalance in pop culture influence.

And I think so. In any healthy relationship, friendship, marriage, isn’t it important for both sides to make an effort to understand the other?

And that this exchange needs to have a healthy balance.

And how do we address this?

As an ambassador for Chinese pop music and movies, I have to ask myself a question: Why does this deficit exist?

Is it because Chinese music just is.. lame? Don't answer that, please.

Yeah I think I see some of you are like, stop complaining and write a hit song! Psy did it!

But there’s truth in that. The argument being that, the content that we’ve created just isn’t as internationally competitive. And why shouldn’t it be?

Look at Korean pop, look at K-pop for example.

Korea is an export-based economy and they are outward looking and they must be outward looking.

Chinese pop on the other hand can just stay domestic, tour all over China, stick in territories and comfortably sustain.

So when you’re that big and powerful, with over 160 cities in China with a million or more people

you tend to kinda turn inward and be complacent. So this certainly can be made an argument

made for Chinese pop not being marketed with international sensibilities in mind.

but the other side of the argument I think is more interesting and thought-provoking and even more true

is that Western ears aren’t familiar with and therefore don’t really understand how to appreciate Chinese music.

Ouch!

Okay.

The reason I think that the argument holds water though is because that’s exactly what I went through

so I happen to know a thing or two about learning to appreciate

Chinese pop as a Westerner

'cause I was 17 years old when I went from being an Asian kid in America

to being an American kid in Asia

and the entire paradigm suddenly got flipped on its head.

I grew up listening to the Beastie Boys, Led Zeppelin, Guns and Roses, and I found myself in Taiwan listening to the radio and thinking, "where’s the beat?

Where are the screeching guitar solos?

Here I am as an American kid in Asia listening to Chinese music for the first time and thinking that "this stuff is lame."

"I don't, I don't like it"

I thought it was cheesy, production value was low, and the singers couldn’t belt like Axl Rose or Mariah Carey.

But then one day

I went to my first Chinese pop concert, and it was Yu, Cheng-Ching. Harlem Yu.

performing at the Taipei Music Centre

and as he performed, I looked around the audience and I saw their faces and the look in their eyes and their response to his music.